Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals

by Eva Hayward

Abstract

In When Species Meet (2008) Donna Haraway proposes that creatures’ identities and affinities emerge through their encounters, their relationships. Following Haraway’s lead, I attend to how different species sense and apprehend one another, leaving impressions—concrescences of perceptual data, or texture. This essay reports on fieldwork alongside marine biologists and with a population of cup corals (B. elegans) housed at the Long Marine Laboratory, Santa Cruz, California. While I assisted researchers who were studying metabolic rates and reproductive strategies in coral communities, these cup corals simultaneously taught me that being and sensing are inextricably enfolded. We were variously situated—corals generating generations, me interpretations. We met through a material-semiotic apparatus I call “fingeryeyes. ” As an act of sensuous manifesting, fingeryeyes offers a queer reading of how making sense and sensual meaning are produced through determinable and permeable species boundaries.

About the Author

Eva Hayward is a researcher at the Center for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on mediated embodiment, specifically relationships between sensation and technology. Her current book studies the corporeal dimensions of undersea media that shape cross-species encounters. She has recently published essays in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Women's Studies Quarterly, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Octopus.

Interview with Eva Hayward

Could you discuss how you arrived at this research topic and your haptic-optic methodological approach of "fingeryeyes"? Did either emerge from your training in film studies and feminist/queer theory, or did they develop while in the field?

There are many threads that go into knotting together fingeryeyes: describing an octopus film by Jean Painlevé, talking with my graduate advisor while she wiggles her fingers to demonstrate multiplicity, or the tentacular reaching of tidal pool anemones as they “taste” and pull my fingers toward digestion. So, I would say that fingereyes equally emerged from film studies, feminist science studies, trans/queer theory, and the “field” of a saltwater table at the Long Marine Laboratory.

You have performed other research projects on the sensual encounters between human and nonhuman species, such as with starfish ("More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves" and spiders ("Spider City Sex"). Why do you choose the nonhuman species you focus on? Do you find some species better to think with, or rather to sense with, on particular topics than others? Do particular species leave stronger "impressions" on you than others?

“More Lessons from a Starfish” aimed to think through the transsexual imaginary of Antony and the Johnson’s song “Cripple and the Starfish.” Antony’s starfish offered me a place to apprehend the regenerative capacities of starfish bodies with the transitional potential of transwomen. I didn’t intend to speak directly about relationships between transsexuals and starfish, but about resonances and dynamic ontologies. In doing so, I suggested that the cut of sex reassignment surgery—a very specific kind of cut—is partly a regenerative act. Cutting the body is an unleashing of potential, reworking the boundaries of bodies. I wrote it as a counter narrative: not confessional, but written in the first person; not about the inherent natures of transsexuality, but about biomaterial potential of sex changing; and, cutting the body maybe healing the body, but in doing so it is also a more-than-human emergence. “Spider City Sex” is a wayward piece—more about webs than spiders, but with a synechdochic understanding that the web is an auto-bio extension of the spider itself. Focusing on San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood where transwomen come together to play, work and live, I conceived that the spider’s web described the effect place and time has on a transitioning body. Transitioning is webbing: at one level a subject acts, but as with spider silk, equally the vibrating force of the web causes the subject. What these pieces on spiders and starfish share is an attention to openness, resource and reach. So, it isn’t so much that I focused on nonhumans as I find the nonhuman already vibrating through what we call the human. In this way, certain expressive capacities, such as webbing or regenerating, can help us hold open the question of the human (or the transsexual for that matter)—not only what or who am I, but also what enables me to do so?

You argue the power dynamic of laboratory practice is not simply about total control and captivity, but also about the unexpected consequences that arise when species touch and leaves impressions upon one another. Nonetheless, the fact that power remains asymmetrical and knowledge production creates ethical "response-ability" between humans and nonhumans seems to be a crucial issue for you throughout the article. How would you characterize the "response-ability" between the human researchers (including yourself) and the coral, particularly in those moments when human touch contributed to the death of these nonhumans? Did your queer perspective influence the way you thought about this issue, particularly given the entwinement you point to between inverts and perverts, queers and animals? Did other individuals negotiate the balance between knowledge production and ethics in different ways?

This is an excellent question. Many readers of the essay have noted this tension. Some wished I refused an “other”—that Hegelian trap—and stayed tuned to the expressive acts (Deleuzian perhaps) of corals and researchers. I couldn’t entirely, since aesthetically and politically, I am troubled by laboratory experiments on animals, even those that propose a benefit for the health of a species such as coral conservation. Who’s future are we hoping to aid? Which future? And still, I remained committed to understanding power as a distributed force with many effects. Corals are not inconsequential forces. Not wanting to pretend that I could distance myself from the problem, I stayed. “Inverts”—its multiple meanings: invert as invertebrate, invert as trans, or put in the opposite position—was one way to point toward this bind. The desire for recognition—a coral other with whom to identify—and its ultimate failure, otherness doesn’t get us very far from anthropomorphism. Sometimes anthropomorphism is important, but this wasn’t my project. I wanted to emphasize the spatial and prepositional import of invert, to invert relations in order to learn something about the redynamizing force of impressions and sense-ability.

Do you have a book project that will be based on this work? If so, could you discuss the overarching arguments you hope to make? There are two projects here, I think. One, with the starfish and spider materials, explores the re-naturalizing (not to be confused with essentialist projects) force of transsexuality. How is transsexuality an expressive potential? If life is an engine for variation, then how might sexual difference be sexual differences?

Intervening in the hyper-representational discourse of trans*, this project offers trans*materiality as a counter to the many misrepresentations of transsexual becoming. The second project, which includes my discussion of corals, is also a materialist project, but focuses on media and marine animals. Studying proximities, impressions, refractions and immersions, I foreground the way marine organisms become our mediations, instructing us on how not only to visualize species difference, but how species impress us to see. Not just surfaces on which knowledge dwells, these animals are quite literally the lenses, the transparencies, through which we make sense sense-able.

Questions for Classroom Discussion

1. What does the author mean by “fingeryeyes”? How is this concept used to analyze encounters between researchers and cup corals in the laboratory, particularly in regard to agency, ontology, and perception?

2. How are the multispecies encounters in this laboratory shaped by power and ethics?

3. How does the author understand and deploy the concept of “species”? How are organisms related to their environment?